Project 88 is pleased to announce, Between here and there, Baptist Coelho’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The title of the exhibition comes from Coelho’s installation, Dream Speech, a five-channel audio with voices of four soldiers and an officer who appear to be communicating with each other through a dream within the setting of five military sleeping bags. The “here and there” refers to varied cultural, historical and psychological occurrences that can exist between two or more points of interaction. These resonate with recurring themes in the artist’s practice, such as random thought, conflict and corporeality, and attempts to reveal the human condition through observations and conversations.
The works in the exhibition include various objects displaced physically from their original settings and conceptually intertwined with new contexts that extend his research. Objects such as: a pair of boots, an aluminum coin, bottles of air and notes from seventy-three countries, sleeping bags, gauze bandages, award ribbons and photographs of the human body, become the focus for Baptist Coelho to uncover stories - connected to geography, history, community, or an individual persona. The juxtaposition of these objects creates residues, which connect the present with the past. They become symbols filtered from vast tracts of research and oral history that were garnered from conversations in diverse parts of the world.
In his works, Coelho explores themes of conflict, discord, war and its aftermath. He engages his subject matter collaboratively by inviting people to participate which create random scenarios that often form layers of meaning to reveal the life and memory of the participants. Various sites of public engagement encompass these exhibited works such as the munitions factories of St. Denis in France, Battersea Park in England, the Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas, and other locations. Diverse questions surface from these works, which seem to emerge from a given space and time, found between here and there.
